I thought he did a good job explaining how coffee grows. The non-coffeegeek coffee consumers have no clues where or how the coffee is cultivated. They have to make the show interesting, otherwise who would watch it?

This show was ridiculous as most reality shows have nothing to do with reality. First he starts out in the market buying 2 pounds of crappy coffee because he doesn't want to offend the locals. Gets a tip on where to go but then rejects it later on? The whole conclusion of the show is a bit laughable too. He stumbles on to a farm that happens to have 19 bags of coffee laying outside, stacked and ready to go for him? I would think you would do your research a head of time and figure out whom to buy from instead of pretending to stumble and bumble your way around the mountains of Haiti. Hoping to find some good quality coffee. Just because its grown at the highest elevation doesn't necessary equate quality. So in my opinion the whole thing is just fake and they are trying to make entertaining TV, like WWF wrestling.

Well, the show got me to try 3 of their beans...I ordered some of the Haiti Mare Blanche single origin espresso, a bag of Nizza and a bag of Lyon. I emailed them prior to ask about roasted on date, and I didn't get a direct answer but was assured that they roast daily and my order was shipped the same day, so I'll see if there's a roasted on date when I receive them.

I think the show is a bit puffed up for the show's own good, obviously if he traveled to Rwanda and was setup in a nice hotel and had guides the entire time nobody would find it interesting and they wouldn't watch.

This show is totally contrived and has almost nothing to do with the way that real roasters go about sourcing beans.

The premise is that some clueless yokel flies into a foreign country with absolutely no advance preparation and then stumbles around until he finds some wild coffee beans for sale by some peasant farmer who has no idea why anyone would drink coffee. The adventurer then makes a big score, saves the farmer from oppression, ends global warming, stops the drug trade, makes the world safe for democracy and celebrates his coolness.

In the first episode, he goes to Haiti and makes a big deal out of buying direct from the grower instead of buying from the evil dealer who he claims has a stranglehold on the growers. So he rents a falling-down truck and heads up into the mountains on a random search for some beans. Along the way, he loses second gear, then breaks a shock, and finally comes to a standstill after his driveshaft breaks, right in the middle of the territory of the dreaded dealer that he's trying to bypass. So what does he do? Calls a non-evil dealer he knows for a new truck, the kind he would have rented in the first place if he was a serious buyer and not a TV creature.

In the second episode, he drives up the notorious "Road of Death" in Bolivia and takes a zip line from one mountain top to another instead of simply taking the new road that's perfectly safe and going direct to the mountain where the coffee is grown. This time it's all about saving Bolivia from the scourge of coca. He makes inane observations about the so-called devastating effects of coca cultivation on the soil that aren't remotely true and then claims all the coca fields are guarded by gun-toting thugs. Thing is, coca cultivation is perfectly legal in Bolivia, and it's freely sold in the markets. People chew it and drink it as a tea to help deal with the effects of the altitude. It's actually less soil-depleting than coffee, as far as that goes, and the fields are not valuable enough to be guarded.

According the Sweet Maria's, Bolivia has a reasonably efficient system of coffee cultivation and processing, largely thanks to the efforts of USAID to build the industry. For the farmer, it's probably more profitable to grow coffee than coca, although it's more labor intensive. In any event, Carmichael didn't "discover" Bolivian coffee, it's long been a big fav in Holland and Germany, again according to Sweet Maria's, folks who know a thing or two about sourcing coffee.

The show is a real train wreak, more or less the "Jersey Shore" of coffee, with the star playing "The Situation." It's oddly entertaining, but don't take a thing the guy says as true. He's the king of all coffee poseurs, to such an extreme that he tries to talk French to Bolivians who barely speak Spanish since they use the indigenous languages.

If you like bad reality shows, you'll find it entertaining, but watching this show will cost you valuable IQ points.

Well, the show got me to try 3 of their beans...I ordered some of the Haiti Mare Blanche single origin espresso, a bag of Nizza and a bag of Lyon. I emailed them prior to ask about roasted on date, and I didn't get a direct answer but was assured that they roast daily and my order was shipped the same day, so I'll see if there's a roasted on date when I receive them.

I think the show is a bit puffed up for the show's own good, obviously if he traveled to Rwanda and was setup in a nice hotel and had guides the entire time nobody would find it interesting and they wouldn't watch.

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